Friday, July 22, 2011

Having watched Ex-Drummer

For almost a couple of years now, movies that i’ve watched have included a certain sense of seriousness – of reality, of the world, of injustice, of stupid governments, of everything that we think is wrong with the world…these movies and documentaries manage to tell you stuff which your parents don’t, teachers didn’t and the media never will…naturally, they excited me. But the problem of enjoying something or things which follow a particular patern is that, you eventually start questioning that too…it’s sort of like a game of equilibrium your inner psycho plays with you i guess. Questioning got me thinking, “what does the other side feel like?” or “how do people with different points of view justify their beliefs, or do they at all?”…No answers. Not one book, movie or person to satisfy that twisted void.
Twisted. that’s the word which can describe the movie “Ex Drummer”.
Here’s a movie that everyone will love to hate, and yet when Belgian film-maker Koen Mortier had completed writing, producing and directing this filthy gem of a movie, he made sure that even the haters were shocked beyond repair, waiting for Cameron Crowe or someone similar, to come with a feel good movie to balance things out inside their brains…Film making has always had had its baggage of censorship and share of ‘altered’ storylines to stick to the status quo that the viewers live in. But rarely, had i come across a movie, which manages to not only pass those barriers but break them into smithereens while doing so. Until now, that is. Anti-feminism, anti-homosexuality, anti-migration, anti-monogamy,anti-affirmative action favouring the disabled, anti-every-civilized-notion….that’s what this movie is. the story itself is quite a shocker..
A middle-aged famous writer, bored with his scaringly normal life, decides to take up the offer of being the drummer in a band, for one show only, where the remaining members are handicapped in more than one way…each. The lead guitarist is a deaf crack head, who doesnt have a clue about his family – crack head wife and crack-head baby girl,who live in the same shady room… the bassist is a homosexual who cannot move the joints in his right arm, due to a masturbatory accident involving his mother and a wig, while he was still young…the lead singer, just likes to beat up women, smashing their skulls open and all – if you can ignore this trait of his and the fact that he is a neo-nazi skinhead who for some unexplained reason walks upside down in his own house, and has a lisp in his speech, then you’ll probably see that he has a warm attitude towards people, as long as they aren’t women or homosexuals. Now our good ol’ protagonist has his own reasons for joining the band…which he calls ‘The Feminists’. So bored yet content is he, that he just wants to attach himself to losers for a while to get a taste of what ‘fucked up’ means…while always having one foot out of the door. One of those people who see which way the wind is blowing, and turn themselves accordingly.
And then again i often wonder, why or how a person could come up with such a movie? what’s inside his head?…or is it just because someone got tired of all the political correctness in movies and the viewers..and decided to make a movie about what people or just he himself think in general?…beats me.
The only way i can describe the shock value of “Ex Drummer” is by saying that if TRAINSPOTTING and IRREVERSIBLE had a one night stand and they had a baby, and that baby would start screwing OLD BOY for a whole year, then their baby would be EX DRUMMER.